The Veterans Health Administration has for the first time acknowledged publicly that software problems with its Online Health Care Application on Vets.gov caused tens of thousands of veteran applications to be locked or lost in the process, forcing the agency to disable the app and pay employees overtime to manually work through the applications.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) update on the “MyVA” transformation shows progress in serving veterans. This is the third update of the semi-annual report on the effort to make VA the No. 1 customer-service agency in the Federal government.

Just weeks before senior officials at the Veterans Health Administration ordered the launch of a new Online Health Care Application through Vets.gov, a senior policy adviser at the White House warned VHA officials that the new app had not been cleared by agency lawyers because of legal and technical issues that, ultimately, affected veteran enrollment across the nation.

The White House announced the creation of 29 tools Thursday that use Federal and local data to address problems identified by Federal agencies as part of the Opportunity Project, an open data effort to improve economic mobility for all Americans.

In August, as President Barack Obama stood in front of the Disabled American Veterans Convention and publicly hailed the success of a new health care enrollment app on Vets.gov, the system had actually been spinning out of control for months, losing thousands of applications, locking records, and allowing officials to mark veterans ineligible for benefits without legal justification, according to hundreds of pages of internal documents obtained by MeriTalk.

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced that the Department of Homeland Security and Hiring our Heroes have teamed up to offer free online, on-demand cybersecurity training to government employees and veterans via DHS’ Federal Virtual Training Environment.